So? Then where's Oak Park?

You were wondering where Greek Town is, you thought on Halsted south of Eisenhower or thereabouts?  You should have asked Chi Trib’s Pamela Sherrod, who locates “Chicago's predominantly Greek neighborhood near Oak Park.”  Kidding you not, am I.  It’s in an article, “Living lean in a 'stuffaholic' world” as it ran in the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times 1/21/06.

Later, from Len:

Well, it's only 10 minutes on the Ike..

and then there's papaspiros... a neighborhood in itself.
(Not to mention George's, Thyme and Honey, Maple Leaf...)

OR maybe she is thinking about the neighborhood around Assumption Greek Orthodox
Church on [Central] next to Loretto Hospital.., must have been a Greek
neighborhood onceuponatime.

True.

Just kids

Is it possible OP police chief Tanksley would prefer not to have told Chi Trib — “Crime Drops in Oak Park” — that the 61% of OP’s 58 assault victims in 2005 who are juveniles were a case of "kids having a problem with other kids”?  A few years back, one of those kids, son of the elementary schools superintendent, needed eye surgery after being attacked in Whittier playground by kids from Austin.  If reported assaults, as Tanksley said, do not appear to be gang-related, they are something else bad that should not be dismissed cavalierly.

Kids at play

Veronica Micklin, of 1001 Wenonah, has great things to say about neighborhood life in Oak Park.  For a look at “children, independence and play,” she says in a letter to NYTimes, come to

the south section of Oak Park, where we live. My son, who is now 18, still walked over to his friends' homes to play when he was home over holiday break, rather than call them on his cell phone. Here the kids draw with chalk on the sidewalk, ride their bikes and walk to the playgrounds and parks. They play whiffle ball in backyards and throw footballs on quiet Sunday streets. Kids walk to school--grade school, middle school and high school! The sound of a ball hitting the pavement under a garage-mounted hoop is stronger than any ring that can be downloaded!

Readers Respond: Taking the Child Out of Childhood - New York Times

Not everybody loves learning

For a lot of smart kids, they provide confidence and validation that are hard to come by in the day-to-day environment of middle school and high school, where academic skills are seldom on top of the heap in terms of recognition.

That’s Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, in Slate Mag two years ago, talking about spelling bees and other contests and making top-drawer sense.  He reflects problems that were front and center in Oak Park’s elementary & junior high District 97 back when our kids were in school, in the 80s and 90s.  How to validate academic skills, yes.

He said it while reviewing the documentary “Spellbound,” about the National Spelling Bee, but linked it while discussing actress-producer Patricia Heaton’s new documentary, “The Bituminous Coal Queens of Pennsylvania,” about a 50–year-old talent and beauty contest in SW Pa. — Patricia Heaton, of course, having been Raymond’s wife on TV in “Everybody Loves . . .”

The coal-queen film is also about people and coal mining, which “has shaped this area of the country, instilling a strength and pride in its citizens.”

Unhappy in Oak Park

This lady didn’t like it in OP,

the only place [she] ever lived where she didn't feel welcome.

"They were so suspicious of the Eastern establishment," she said. "'Harvard' [her alma mater by way of its women’s college, Radcliffe] was a dirty word. I always voted Democrat, but there was only one other person in Oak Park that I know of who did. I was scared to death to mention it to anyone."

Still years before the Civil Rights movement, [she and her husband, Rev.] Martin [Sargent] — fed up with the racial intolerance they saw around them — began to organize ways to document the racism, mostly by bringing black people in from Chicago and having them try to shop at segregated local malls.

It was a difficult time for the Sargents in many ways, and a time of change. They had their first two children before Martin was reassigned to a church in Foxborough, Mass. — a place where they felt more at home.

This would have been in the mid– to late 40s.  She is Barbara Sargent, 84, interviewed in the Bath, Maine, Times-Record News, “in her stately living room with her dog sleeping on her lap.”  She had grown up in NY City, daughter of a Lutheran pastor in mid-town Manhattan across from Central Park, where a flock of real sheep was tended by a real shepherd.

In Massachusetts “they felt more at home.”  Then there was Maine and Paris, France, where she thrived.  They got to know Martin Luther King.  She got over her Oak Park experience, apparently, which is nice.

Pro-choice is best

 ... when it comes to education

By JIM BOWMAN

January 4, 2006, Wednesday Journal of OP&RF

Columnist Jack Crowe says let’s talk about school [Viewpoints, Dec. 14]. OK, don’t blame me. It was his idea. He has middle schools in mind-public, or government, schools. The latter is preferred by ex-UIC Prof. Herbert J. Walberg in his and Joseph L. Bast’s Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools because they are funded and run by government agencies. That’s a cruel and heartless way to refer to our beloved school staffs and leadership, but let’s do it this once.

Let’s also put an interesting question: Can government schools be competitive? They must be, you say. Most kids go there, don’t they? But they are a monopoly as to funding, and we have found that monopolies do nothing for competition. Remember Ma Bell?

Competition happens, however. Ask any real estate broker selling a neighborhood. This is school-to-school competition, aided and abetted by published test scores. It happens within schools, too, in the choice parents have about middle-school subjects-typing? chorus? art? French? Spanish?-and even about teachers. There could be more of this: you could have homework classes and non-homework classes. Parents could choose. This would be a pro-choice program that even conservatives would approve.

Or teachers could declare for phonics or not, and parents could choose. Or for drilling in fundamentals vs. enrichment. For memorizing poetry or not. As freshmen at Fenwick in 1945, we memorized poetry-"The stag at eve had drunk its fill, where danced the moon on Monan’s rill," "I wandered lonely as a cloud," "‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

But spare your country’s flag,’ she said." And much, much more. Our lives were never the same. Mine wasn’t, anyhow. We gave speeches, too; every freshman took speech, like it or not.

In this pro-choice environment, teachers would still run classrooms, out of which parents could butt. But parents would choose this or that in general terms. They’re the ones who have to live with the kids anyhow. Let them decide.

Some do it already, big time. They say no to government schools, paying their money and taking their choice at schools called Grace or Ascension or Calvary [No: Oak Park Christian Academy is the day school at Calvary church: better here wld be Alcuin or Waldorf, to name two].  Others skip school buildings completely, like Cindy Miller, on Wesley Avenue. She and her husband Jay and other couples do it themselves. Jay, an engineering consultant, teaches physics. Cindy’s friend Pat Larson teaches Latin and history. Cindy teaches literature. As many as 15 kids might be in a session, from five families. These are mini-schools, or as one observer put it, "private schools on the cheap."

The kids get out, as to see "Nutcracker Suite" at Morton East High School. The Millers’ oldest is an Eagle Scout. Their oldest daughter has taken acting classes at Village Players; she’s in her second season as a Lyric Opera supernumerary. Another son is pitcher and shortstop with a local traveling team. Another daughter takes violin, another guitar.

Home-schoolers’ reasons run a gamut. For the Millers, members of Calvary Memorial Church, where home-schooler parents meet regularly, "the Christian element" is the big thing. Cindy Miller has found it’s "good to cater to" each child’s progress. The experience has also been good for "family dynamics," which in their case are super-dynamics-the Millers have nine children, from two to age 19.

The nine have been home-schooled since birth. She and her husband, unsure at first, were willing to try it. If it didn’t work, they were willing to pack their first-born off to kindergarten. So it went with the other eight: schooling began when they were born. It progressed seamlessly. As for truancy issues and the long arm of the state, which in some places can be quite intrusive, Illinois law is liberal in the matter. Home-schooled kids are to be taught core subjects in English for a required number of days, but no reporting is required. It’s a fairly pro-choice environment.

Perils of home schooling in Joliet

Egad!  The ink hardly dry on my Wed. Journal column due out tomorrow (if my tardiness deadline-wise does not delay it), which I close with reference to Illinois’ liberalism in the matter, not prosecuting home-schoolers for truancy, I hear from the Home School Legal Defense Assn. (HSLDA) about a Joliet family hauled into court: 

In Illinois, homeschoolers only need to teach the same branches of instruction in the English language that are being taught in public schools . . . ever since an important state Supreme Court case [in] 1950 [that gave them private-school status].

Nonetheless, certain school districts tend to demand more of homeschoolers than is actually required by law. . . .  The Will County Regional Superintendent's Office sent a truant officer to contact the [Walters] family.

He said the kids — all four but one “chronic” — were truant.  HSLDA complained immediately, but the truant officer went to the local prosecutor, who charged the family with truancy. He said the chronic required "supervision." HSLDA found the truant officer in violation of a statute requiring written notice of truancy before charges were filed. The father asked for a continuance, the judge refused, not allowing the father even to ask.  The kid had to be in school the next day.

The mother went to the district the next day.  Once the regional superintendent saw she had a teaching certificate, lesson plans and plenty of books and was told of the truant officer’s failure to file proper notice, he called the state's attorney and got the case dropped.

Nuts to you

Coldstone Creamery ice cream shop on Marion south of Lake is "not a nut-free environment," it warns in its window, speaking allergy-wise. Otherwise, however, need this be said, since we expect in the normal course of things to meet at least one nut per environment in OP?

Save the Colt!

Wednesday, December 7, 2005, Wednesday Journal of OP

JIM BOWMAN

Remembering Colt ... Talk of the Colt building these days brings back a cherished boyhood memory, when Dear Old Dad would take us on the Lake Street car to go and see it. We’d get off at Marion and walk the half block west and stop to gaze and gasp.

Dad would put his arm on my shoulder and say, "There it is, Jim, the building time forgot." I never forgot.

"It’s art deco," he said many times. I didn’t have the gumption to ask what that was but knew it was special.

The whole family would go. We’d take our lunch and munch it while watching from across the street. Sometimes the peanut butter would not go down easily, as a certain constriction took over the throat—constriction at construction, of a truly wonderful building.

How different today, when to stand on that spot is to witness another construction in progress, of luxury condominiums for big spenders who one day might walk the New Street to Metra—will they call it "New," making every other street sound old?—and while they’re at it will help fund police, fire and trash-collection services beyond our dreams, not to mention schools, parks, and library.

But there are days when I could care less about that, when I look at such an ugly construction site and think that one day such would occur on the ruins of our beloved Colt.

Even today I meet or hear of visitors from abroad who have heard about our Colt and want to see it. "We came to see the Colt," they say, and are aghast at the news that the village quibbles at spending five-plus million to buy and restore it. They return to their native lands shaking their heads.

One can only ask, plaintively, is there a Cicero in our midst who can stand up and ask, "How long, how long, Oh Taxman, will you abuse our patience with your regressive views on Colt, insisting on the letter of a contract imprudently signed by village fathers and mothers a few short months ago?"

Is there a Balzac who can sprinkle our walls with a reproachful "J’accuse!"—thus to finger the perpetrators of sacrilege in our midst? And for what? To enlarge our tax base!

Finally, is there a Patrick Henry who can tell our burgesses, as he told those of Virginia about something else in 1775, "I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me Colt or give me nothing!"? I ask you.

Weaponry ... Meanwhile, on another front entirely, a soft but persistent voice suggests to some citizens that even with excellent emergency response by police, there may be something walkers and riders can do to fend off harm. With that in mind, they consider gaps in Oak Park’s weapons ordinances.

There’s no mention of Mace, pepper spray, stun gun, or Taser. Knife and blackjack are mentioned only in connection with pawnbrokers, who must not keep either around. Air gun or bow-and-arrow or any other projectile-firing mechanism are ruled out for use, except arrows on a range supervised by the board of ed or park district—Ridgeland Commons on a slow day?—and blanks fired on stage, presumably for scary or other effect.

That leaves Mace, pepper spray, stun gun, Taser, knife, blackjack. The pepper sprays are good for eight feet, says TBO Tech-dot-com, the Taser for 15, the stun gun for no feet: you have to touch someone to stun him. It comes disguised as umbrella or flashlight or something else if the citizen wishes. Years ago on the West Side, a friend of mine in the projects said she had a friend who had to wait at night for a bus at Halsted and Lake. In her muff she hid a small pistol. The man who asked her for a match was a dead man. Maybe a spray or Taser shot would do it now, even in Oak Park.

Right here in River City

You never know what you’ll find in the newspapers.  This in USA Today is not all about me, which is a shame, but I’m in it.  Carla K. Johnson of AP-Chicago did a good job here, as did fotog Jeff Roberson, whom I gave a brief tour of OP’s Lake-OP Ave. intersection on a beautiful day.  In fact, as you can see, OP is featured as much as I, which is not a shame.

The story was also picked up by The Southern.com, “Southern Illinois’ home page,” without pic.

Milstein talks

“He does that a lot,” OP village president Pope told a person addressing the village board, meaning “Don’t mind him.”  This was trustee Robert Milstein, who was taking forever, with multiple asides, to ask his question.

Death of a barber shop

Dino Dini’s barber shop is in its last days.  He’s retiring after 40 years at 66.  So are his barbers Frank, 89 (!), and Tony, 69.  It’s here and here. That didn’t keep recruiters away.  Two were there this afternoon, checking on their plans: retirement, retirement, retirement.  So the recruiters were going away empty-handed.  What then of the shop?  Dino has had four or five inquiries, none of which have led to a lease with Kehoe & Co., the building managers.  The building, a big one, on the SW corner of Marion & Chicago, was bought a few years ago by a group of investors.  There apparently is no replacement barber shop in its future.

Meanwhile, a half mile south, also on Marion — on the pedestrian mall, from Lake to the tracks — rents are going up, says one merchant, and the smaller shops will probably be moving.  A very big condo development is going up just beyond the viaduct, on the SE corner of Marion & South Blvd.  Its units will not be going for peanuts.  Its residents will be flocking to nearby shops which will reflect their ability to pay more.

Times are a-changing in OP.  Weep and wail if you must, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it, not while there’s a tax base to keep in mind for our schools and parks and library, to name three OP-required amenities of the first water.  Goodbye, Dino.  Enjoy your retirement.  And haircut-seekers, take note: Saturday the 17th is the last day.  Dino will take his chair.  The other two are pretty well spoken for by loyal customers, a number of whom shook hands with Dino and the other two on their way out this afternoon.

OP&RF today

Dominican U.’s easement-seeking enters a new phase, as here, where we read in Wed. Journal of OP&RF:

With the belief that any legal uncertainty over the ownership of a small swatch of wooded land along Thatcher Avenue has been resolved in its favor, Dominican University will move ahead with zoning applications to build a parking garage and classroom building on the west side of its River Forest campus.

. . .

At the heart of the matter is village approval for a driveway curb cut along Thatcher Avenue between Division Street and Greenfield Avenue. If that driveway is OKd, it would allow new access to the west side of the campus and lead to construction of a 550-car parking garage and a new Academic Building.

Legal advice and Forest Preserve District support in favor of DU is bolstered by heavyweight political support from county commissioner and Elmwood Park mayor Peter Sylvestri.  River Forest village administrator Chuck Biondo says RF is aboard.  It’s all in the wake of extensive protesting by OP resident Victor Guarino and others who argued last March that the land belongs to the Forest Preserve: “There hasn’t been a thorough enough study of this.” Characterizing the current turn of events as “very complicated,” Guarino insisted that the Cook County Board of Commissioners, which administers the Forest Preserve district, has never told the university that it owns the property.

“[Board president John] Stroger said [last] Wednesday that he never told Dominican University that they owned that land,” said Guarino. “We’re calling for an independent legal counsel to review this.”

Stroger doesn’t turn up in the latest story, being perhaps busy with other things such as allegations of corruption on the board he heads.

==============================

Elsewhere we read that “Planning is socialism,” a point of view that runs against the Oak Park and maybe River Forest grain these days.  It’s at http://www.mises.org/story/1910, which Calif. Assemblyman Ray Haynes [raysahay@aol.com], representing parts of Western Riverside County and Northern San Diego County, says in part:

Anyone who thinks that planning for "growth" is anything other than a exercise in futility is still experiencing the mind-altering visions that their college chemicals visited upon him or her so many years ago. Today's planners meet in little rooms, draw pretty pictures on paper maps, use the prettiest crayons they can find, and — whamo — the city has a plan. Wonder and utopia are supposed to follow, and never again will the city experience traffic congestion or cosmic disharmony.

Ouch and double ouch from OP, where plans proliferate.  Haynes gives chapter and verse on how plans don’t work in California, concluding:

We know that socialism is a failed experiment, as demonstrated by the failure of the Soviet Union, socialism's most devoted practitioner. My socialist colleagues in the Legislature, however, think that they are smarter than the Russians and that socialism will work here in California if we just have the right plan. The most recent polls tell us that the public is not satisfied with how we are doing our job. Maybe we should try something different, like freedom and free enterprise, the principles that made this country great.

As they said in the (mostly imagined) 60s barricades, right on!

Peace fair, Sept. 6 Wed. Jnl column

"What does peace look like?" ask Peace Fair promoters. 

Try a nation run by German Nazis or Russian Communists or Sadaam the Sadistic and his Wretched Sons. 

================================

Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Trapani wastes no time getting out of town, on board
JIM BOWMAN
Tuesday, September 06, 2005

TRAPANI TRANSPLANTED Elmwood Park must be pleased as punch to have former Oak Park village president and trustee Joanne Trapani, a new resident, on its Plan, Zoning and Development Commission (PZD). She was introduced at the Aug. 1 meeting of the Elmwood Park trustees, its minutes say. She bought a house in Elmwood Park 10 days after the April 5 Oak Park election. Her first PZD meeting was to be Aug. 8. The next is set for Sept. 9.

END OF OP AS WE KNOW IT? Ex-Oak Park trustee Barbara Ebner wrote both newspapers saying the village-manager concept is jeopardized by New Leadership trustees’ suggesting a hiring commission and regionalization of trustee accountability. She says the first takes from the manager what belongs to him, the second makes aldermen out of at-large trustees responsible to the whole village, not just part of it. This is sniping of a high order. It gets to mindset, even philosophy.

HOMER NODS (SAID HORACE), BUT CONCORDIA? The Concordia U. motto "Empowering the mind, Enriching the spirit" should be the other way around, "Enriching the mind, Empowering the spirit." The mind is well stocked or isn’t, the spirit is willing or isn’t, or so Matthew (26:41) and Mark (14:38) tell us.

WHATEVER DID IT WANT? The Village of Oak Park called Aug. 18 at 9:43 a.m. asking how I was doing that day. It had a young female voice: "This is the Village of Oak Park." When I suggested in slightly raised volume—nothing like when I tell the dog across the street to shut up—that it not ask me that and get on with its business, it hung up.

DIG THAT NUTTY EMERSON Here in Oak Park, there was once a Hawthorne School and once an Emerson. We know that, but do we know that Hawthorne considered Emerson and his friends "queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved [seeing themselves as] important agents of the world’s destiny, yet [were] simply bores of a very intense water?" We didn’t, but now we do, thanks to an essay by Christopher Benfey in the Times Literary Supplement last December.

WHO’S IN CHARGE? Lines formed to the right and the left (not sure who’s right, who’s left) at a District 97 board meeting last June in the matter of teacher and principal evaluations. Peter Barber (yay Beye!) and Julie Blankemeier, both newly elected, stood for getting in on the process early and often. Marcia Frank, not newly elected, demurred: "We at the board are not conducting the evaluation. ... [W]e’re micromanaging if we decide what needs to be evaluated."

That’s about as old a school conundrum as there is: Do parents trust the professionals or would they rather count the cards? Do parents think only of their own kids, not of all kids, and don’t know how to take care of all, as only the pros do? Or are teachers their surrogates, responsible to them whatever their training? When Dist. 97 solves this conundrum, it should issue an all-points bulletin to school districts coast to coast.

JAVA JIVE Caribou on Lake Street, late fall, 7 a.m. Handsome couple behind counter. Very personable guy. Customer says a cup of regular for here, man asks if he wants award-winning Colombian, brandishing announcement of Caribou’s award. Customer says yes, man gives him a cup, says he gets three refills. He says he would never drink that much, but it’s nice to know.

ROMANTIC SPOKEN HERE In his novel Waverley, Walter Scott, creator of the historical novel as we know it, depicts his hero as romantic by upbringing, thanks to his seat-of-pants, highly literate but unsupervised and largely unstructured schooling. The lad’s tutor, with other fish to fry, let him have his head. It’s like most Oak Park kids these days. One of the best of Oak Park elementary-school teachers some years back encouraged students to "create" (not discover) knowledge, she told me.

YOUR SOURCE FOR EVERYTHING Bowman’s blogs—Chicago Newspapers; Blithely, Blithely; and Oak Park, Home of Edgar Rice Burroughs—are linked at www.jimbowman.com.

Parish notes: St. Giles

Northwest Oak Park’s Catholics flock to and generously support St. Giles, which is a monument not only to Catholic faith and culture but to the rise (mostly) of the Irish from proles to bourgeois, and I don’t mean petit.  It’s a grand structure, a “plant” to warm cockles of pastors’ hearts for these 70 or so years.  But what of St. Giles the man?

It’s his day today.  Those in the know and on the go read Saint of the Day for their information, which is “shrouded in mystery,” but so what?  I love a mystery, and so do lots of people. 

Giles died in or around 710 (we think).  One thing is for sure.  He was “one of the most popular saints in the Middle Ages.”  He hosted pilgrims on their way to Compostella in Spain and the Holy Land in a monastery he built.  After he died, he was listed among the 14 Holy Helpers, who were good to pray to when sick or dying — when a fellow needs a friend, to be sure.  St. Christopher, who came a-cropper due to historians’ shooting down his existence, was one of the 14.

In any case, Giles was very big in Sweden, Hungary, and parts of Germany and eventually got a reputation for helping the poor and disabled.  He couldn’t save his monastery hostel, however.  It fell apart some centuries after he died.  It was a sort of sic transit experience (there goes glory), which shows saints have them too.  St. Giles, pray for us.

Rethinking Crandall-Arambula?

NE Side robberies have residents more than alarmed: they are sick of it and won’t take any more of it.  More than 230 showed at Hatch school for a meeting with police.  The ubiquitous Deputy Chief Scianna led discussion.  Janice Sanchez is resident in charge.  She was delighted at the turnout and residents’ response.  NE Side is adjacent to the high-crime thickly populated N. Austin neighborhood (of the city, Chicago), some of whose residents apparently look on Oak Parkers as easy pickings, coming at them in alleys when they put cars in garages at night.  They show guns and get money.  One woman spotted them as she backed into her garage — never back in: you can back out in the morning when the coast is clear — and changed course, heading back into alley, which she exited with horn blaring.  OP’s top cop has told residents to skip overnight parking ban and put the damn vehicle in front, which is common sense.  Neighborhood watch is in high gear.  Stay posted.

Elsewhere, recently elected Peter Barber has questions and objections at OP elem school Dist. 97 board meetings.  Board is attacking something called “accountability,” which seems to be willingness of professional educators to bring citizens into the act, as through board’s writing questions for teacher– and principal-evaluation questionaires.  This board is setting goals — it’s a school district, for gosh sakes: it doesn’t know its goals?  Another new boarder, Julie Blankemeier, is “skeptical” about said goals, which seems reasonable.

On the village board side, (also) new trustee (all from last spring’s elections) Greg Marsey alluded to a goal of village government, “to make business districts more attractive.”  This is our local mercantilism, which is clearly the path that OP has chosen.  Streets are torn up and remade, buildings are bought and managed, cul-de-sacs are installed, downtowns are sometimes redone (but not The Avenue, OP & Lake St., the true heart of the village).  What if the village let the market decide such things?

Meanwhile, Ken Trainor chronicles an episode in mercantilism in his very readable, very informative story about the bus trip to Lake Forest and points west and south to LaGrange and Elmhurst, in which a non-profit planner seeks business for his organization — oops, does the civic-responsible thing — by showing trustees and village staffers how quaintness survives business expansion.  The story has only one damning feature: Trainor uses a neologism, “kibbutzing,” when he means discussion.  Neologism because a kibbutz is a settlement in Israel, noun not verb, and anyhow he means “kibbitzing,” which means looking over the shoulder of a card player or eavesdropping but commonly, erroneously is used for discussing.  Tsk, tsk.

St. Edmund is the Church of the Comparatively Cramped Pew. It's a situation I have recognized at the local Presbyterian church turned Latin-mass Catholic, where pews have been shoehorned in. Not cramped, however, is St. Catherine of Siena, a mile to the east of St. Edmund. It's also about twice the overall size of St. Edmund and has wider aisles. God fits in anywhere, of course, but what about us worshippers?

How govern OP?

This by former OP trustee Barbara S. Ebner appeared recently in both local papers.  It is a good response to new leadership ideas in the Village board:

Please allow me to affirm that I am a true believer in the Council Manager form of government. It has stood us in good stead for 50 years and has moved Oak Park far ahead of its neighbors who retain the use of the aldermanic form. It has allowed us to become the diverse, welcoming, prize-winning village we are, while our neighbors to the south suffer from scandals, intrigue and party politics.

In that regard, several disturbing recommendations were made at the village board’s study session last Monday night. They were made by new trustees, and I would like to believe they were made from innocence, not as an attempt to change the government form. To my knowledge, we have had no referendum on changing our form of government. You were elected to serve under this form.

I will only address two of the issues that I see as challenging governance under our current Village Manager form. There are others, and I hope they will also be addressed.

First, a recommendation was made to discuss the forming of a Personnel Commission, although no specifics were given. Since commissions are formed to make recommendations to the board, such a commission has no function. One of the basic tenets of the Council Manager form of government specifically places all hiring and firing of staff in the hands of the professional manager. The single employee of the board, the Village Manager, is the only person such a commission would be responsible for. Unless, the board was to require a search for a new Village Manager, such a commission would have no tasks.

Second, a recommendation to give responsibility for a specific geographic area to each member of the board was made. Although the Council Manager form of government allows for such divisions, there is no place for such a system in Oak Park. We are a tiny, land-locked community. We have made diversity our single most important goal. Our geography is probably our least diverse aspect.

Trustees are elected to serve all of Oak Park. Their major function is to set policy, and approve a budget which reflects these policy decisions. Directing individual activities to a specific geographic area of the village can only mean making these individuals spokespersons for individual areas. In other places they call them aldermen.

It immediately puts trustees at odds with one another. Arguments over how many pot holes were tilled, streets repaved, etc. in a given area would only be the beginning. This is not the goal of our form of government. It can only make meetings longer, make it necessary to have more meetings and provide more acrimony, not less. This is exactly the situation that takes away time and energy from your ability to govern under the Council Manager form of government.

Allow me to quote from a document from the international Council Manager’s Association (ICMA org for those interested). "The council is the legislative body; its members are the community’s decision makers. Power is centralized in the elected council, which approves the budget and determines the tax rate, for example. The council also focuses on the community’s goals, major projects, and such long-term considerations as community growth, land use development, capital improvement plans, capital financing and strategic planning. The council hires a professional manager to carry out the administrative responsibilities and supervises the manager’s performance."

First, do your job! Then allow the Village Manager to do his.

Wed Jnl column up

See Wednesday Journal for my column on New leadership village board commentary. 

Historically accurate for most part & Margaret!

It should be noted that Sun-Times is no better than Chi Trib when it comes to giving email addresses with bylines.  As in today’s stories here and here about Chicago Historical Society getting a new president, a lawyer — in neither story, by the way, the new man is so designated only at the end, leaving some of us to wonder if new “leader” is president or chairman.  Trib gives William Mullen address, wmullen@tribune.com — at end of story, vs. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel standard, putting it right under byline, thus to encourage reader response.  No address is given for S-T’s Andrew Hermann.

Both call Jones Day a Chicago law firm, but it’s a Cleveland firm — “The Cleveland megafirm,” Startribune.com called it just yesterday — with a Chicago office since 1987, which is a case of getting something on the fly, I’d say, and not checking it — copy desk anywhere?

Both stories, on the other hand, were of keen interest to this reader, who caught the immediate past president, Lonnie Bunch, in an Oak Park appearance in 2002 and was impressed with his ambivalence about living in Oak Park, apparently for reasons of race, even though he had picked it over Wilmette rather than put his child in an all-white school.  We don’t have all-white schools in Oak Park.  Bunch by his own admission had been well received in Oak Park and was a featured speaker in a centennial program.  He spoke off the cuff and got caught in that ambivalence by a question after his talk from a fellow black.

In any case, Bunch announced in March that he was returning to Washington and the Smithsonian to head up a new Afro-Am museum, this after presiding over severe blows to the midsection of the Chicago society, which during his tenure came up with big deficit, low attendance, and heavy staff cuts.  His parting shot, one might say, was an exhibit all about lynching and other white-on-black atrocities of the last several centuries. 

Might there be a connection here with declining attendance?  Give me the parent eager to take his kiddies to see gruesome pictures of lynchings, and I give you one in a distinct numerical minority.  Bunch is praised in absentia by the society’s chairman as a tough act to follow, for his “ability to reach out” to blacks and hispanics; but that seems to have been a case of treating them monolithically and assuming they aren’t like us white folks.  Blacks and hispanics may not be all so eager to put their kids through the blood-and-thunder aggrieved-minority process as some think.

The new man, Gary T. Johnson, will be handing over day-to-day duties to CHS veteran Russell Lewis, which seems wise.  Johnson has to go out there and raise money.

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On another front, see Margaret Ramirez’ page one Chi Trib virtual takeout on Mormons.  Having roundly criticized her recently, I must say this is a good one, done not on deadline but with time to spare and lots of room — it’s a whopping 2,220 words!  The peg is newly arriving blacks and hispanics among Mormon membership.  That is handled with nice combination of stats and quotes, while a neat summary of Mormonism is also provided.  I love you, Margaret!  All is forgiven!